Should I choose UVA or University of Richmond for psychology?

The biggest practical tradeoff is scale: UVA gives you a much larger psychology department with more breadth in courses, labs, and faculty, while the University of Richmond gives you a smaller, more personal academic environment with easier day-to-day access to professors. For psychology specifically, that means UVA may offer more subfields and research groups to explore, but Richmond can make it simpler to build close mentoring relationships early. If your priority is the broadest academic menu and a major research-university setting, UVA has the edge; if your priority is close faculty contact and a tight undergraduate focus, Richmond is very compelling.

At UVA, psychology is housed in a major research university, so you are likely to find more specialized coursework and a larger number of faculty doing research across different areas of psychology. That can be very helpful if you are still figuring out whether you lean toward clinical, cognitive, developmental, neuroscience, or social psychology. The tradeoff is that at a large university, you may need to be more proactive about office hours, lab outreach, and finding your place in a big department.

At Richmond, the psychology experience is shaped by the liberal arts model. Classes tend to be smaller, undergraduates are the center of the academic mission, and faculty mentoring is often more direct. For grad school preparation, that can matter a lot because strong recommendation letters, close research supervision, and sustained relationships with professors are often easier to develop in that setting.

For research, both can work well, but the experience may feel different. UVA may provide more total labs and projects, especially across a wider range of specialties. Richmond may offer fewer overall labs, but undergraduates can sometimes get meaningful hands-on roles sooner because there are no graduate students competing for attention in the same way.

UVA probably offers the stronger overall psychology platform, but Richmond can be the better choice for graduate school preparation if you will take full advantage of its smaller, more personal structure.